“It Is Finished”: A Good Friday Meditation

A Good Friday meditation delivered at the First United Methodist Church in Trenton, Texas on April 15, 2022.

“When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, ‘It is finished,’ and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” — John 19:30

It is finished. One of the most powerful phrases in human vocabulary. A phrase that evokes the end of something. A phrase that declares the completion of something good or even something bad. We experience finality in all sorts of situations— crafting and eating a delicious meal or building a home. Finishing brings a sense of relief and wellbeing while anticipating a future of possibilities. 

Who would have thought that our future would be opened so radically than through this moment of human history when Jesus would sacrificially lay down his life for our sake by way of the brutally grotesque cross—a form of death that the ancient philosopher Cicero says, to paraphrase, no honorable citizen should neither speak of nor look upon (Cicero, Rab. Perd. 16)?

Our desolate future of judgment and death—our rebellion, our sin, our deceitfulness that has marred God’s design for us—Jesus took upon himself. Our filth that dominates our hearts in darkness, Jesus liberates. By his death, “[God] made [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21), so that we could be liberated to a future of life and peace with the Father, having been “delivered from the kingdom of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of [God’s] beloved Son” (Col. 1:13), King Jesus.

It is finished. Our separation from the Father is now eternally restored. No longer are we strangers and enemies to the Father but beloved children who worship in spirit and truth (Rom. 5:10; Jn. 4:24). No longer bound to the death deserved, because the One True Son of Man who laid his life down to ransom us from our bondage and the death we deserve.

His mission found completeness in his sacrifice. In his moment of God forsakenness, the disciples thought the end had come to the faithfulness of God in Israel and Jesus—death with its finality. But do not be mistaken. Something beautiful happened that day: in the midst of death and darkness God brought life. And the resurrection for which we anticipate and for which we hope points back toward this moment of darkness when Jesus satisfied the wrath of God for our good, for our life with the Father.

After Jesus said these powerful words, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit, trusting fully the One Who Sent Him to rescue creation from the grips of destruction and death. In this moment, Jesus did not do what many of us do—cling to our control and power. He did not call the angels of God from the heavens, but “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame” (Heb. 12:2) in humility, resulting in the “canceling the record of [our] debt [before God] that stood against us with its legal demands” (Col 2:14). Jesus trusted the faithfulness of the Father in that most vulnerable, painful, dark hour. He rested in the One “who will not abandon [his] soul to Hades” (Acts 2:27; Ps. 16:10).

In the height of our despair, our natural reaction is to exert power, to protect the self. Yet Jesus in his despair sought the joy before him. In agony, he considered our relationship to the Lifegiving Father more significant than himself. As we follow Jesus in his death, we embody the sacrifice of Jesus to others. The Father faithfully demonstrates his promises to us to bring the dry bones to life (Ez. 37) in the words: It is finished. And as we walk humbly in the Spirit of God, putting to death our desires for someone else’s good, we point others to Jesus’s last words, “It is finished”, because in these words we profess in our despair, as Jesus, the faithfulness of the God who powerfully raises the dead to praise him. 

Oh, how often we desire in our days of turmoil desire to control our circumstances or exert power over another. Yet the way of Jesus provides us with an opportunity to walk in the Lord humbly, giving thanks that he too “will not abandon [our] soul[s] to Hades.” In this climatic moment of God forsakenness, Jesus opened up a future of possibility—a possibility with a good life with the Father, completing an atoning sacrifice that neither you nor I in our blemished sinfulness could fulfill. May we find rest in the finished lifegiving sacrifice of Jesus in our weary, difficult days.